Many of us who were assigned Foucault somewhere in our college days were taught to dread the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's maximally surveillant prison design. In some of us it may evoke the image of the police state and the sound of jackboots in the alley. In others, who perhaps read the text a little more carefully, it stands for more insidious forms of coercion and uniformity that, gulling the population under control, masquerade as higher forms of social progress and even freedom.

But forget for a moment prisons, schools, militaries, and all those areas of life where the conscious asymmetry of observing and being observed influences behavior. Think toddler playgrounds. Think sprawling suburban playgrounds overrun with children on a school holiday, three of your own dashing impulsively and variously from one shiny construction to the next, and then to the next, disappearing briefly to re-emerge somewhere quite different. And then, one of them, not re-emerging at all. The self-calming self-talk, this has all happened before, the systematic scanning, the mounting cycles of rationalization and hastier scanning, the all out panic. You start asking random parents whether they've seen a child of such and such a description and they take on your alarm like contagion. And all the while, there she sat in an odd little recess contentedly digging holes in the shredded tires. Kids that age, once absorbed in play, don't even notice the call of nature, let alone the habits of the parent on duty.

What a playground like that needs is a simple fence around the perimeter and mounted picnic area in the middle for parents to chat and idle. What we need, and I've thought this practically every time I've taken the kids out to play, is the Toddler Panopticon. (Even a real panopticon would do, especially on a rainy day. What toddler would not thrill to run down circular corridors and up and down steps, and swing from all manner of bars and banisters?)

Now as it turns out, not only does the Toddler Panopticon exist, but it far surpasses my modest notion. A certain Cub Run Recreation Center in Chantilly, VA, boasts an entire indoor toddler pool, with a jungle gym half submerged in very shallow water, artificial currents and slides of many heights, and at least two young lifeguards watchfully pacing the edges at all times. And in the middle, rising above it all and commanding a view of every corner, oh gentle reader!, is the jacuzzi.

And last a play area restorative to parent and child alike. Thank you, Jeremy Bentham!

Foucault on the panopticon: "the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so." The result of this arrangement is self-surveillance. Unsure whether we're being watched, we must always watch ourselves and adjust our behavior just in case.

I wonder how this shakes out for the toddler panopticon. Maybe the internalization of norms and the self-regulation that Foucault found so unsettling are already an unavoidable part of the socialization that comes with growing up. Children, after all, are notoriously sensitive to peer pressure and conscious of how they look to others. Many a self-confident adult was a desperate pleaser, a submissive herd-being, at the age of thirteen. Is it going too far to say that childhood and adolescence are already their own panopticon?

Not at all, I would think: consider the popularity of "I have eyes in the back of my head"...you never know when mom is watching...

Indeed, the very structure of the human head, with its limited visual field and large blind spots, makes panopticism a natural phenomenon. It happens all the time that we are watched without knowing it.

If there's any question,then, I would say it concerns the degree of panopticism in a given setting and not whether there is such a phenomenon at all.